Leon Katz (playwright)

For the Canadian physicist, see Leon Katz (physicist).

Leon Katz (born July 10, 1919) is professor emeritus of drama at Yale University. He is a playwright, dramaturg, and scholar.

Scholarship

As a scholar, Katz is primarily known for his interviews with Alice B. Toklas, the companion of Gertrude Stein, over four months in 1952-53. The interviews and their interpretations have served as the basis for much of the Stein scholarship over the years. In October 2007, Katz gave a public lecture and performance based on his time spent with Toklas in her Paris apartment. Titled "An Evening With Leon Katz," the performance was staged using reproductions of art and some original furniture from Stein and Toklas's apartment.

Playwrighting

Besides his association with Toklas, Katz is known for his body of plays, which have been adapted and performed both in the United States and internationally. His plays include The Three Cuckolds, Sonya, Dracula: Sabbat, Son of Arlecchino, GBS in Love, Beds, Pinocchio, Finnegan's Wake, The Marquis de Sade’s Justine, Amerika, The Odyssey, Swellfoot’s Tears, The Dybbuk, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Making of Americans (an opera based on Stein’s novel, with music by composer Al Carmines).

Professorship and Dramaturgy

Katz has also had a long career as a dramaturg and professor, contributing to the development of numerous prominent theatre, film, and television professionals throughout the United States. In addition to Yale (where he was co-chairman of the School of Drama's Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism), he has taught at UCLA, Cornell, Stanford, Columbia University, Vassar College, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Giessen in Germany, and the Rhodopi International Theatre Laboratory in Bulgaria (of which he is a founding member, and which was renamed in his honor in 2008), amongst many others. He was most recently a Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1984, he wrote a short essay, The Compleat Dramaturg, a standard amongst learning tools for the profession of Dramaturgy. In 2012, his book, Cleaning Augean Stables: Examining Drama's Strategies, was published.

Katz was a contributing dramaturg to Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-Prize winning play, Angels in America.

External References

[Cleaning Augean Stables http://www.amazon.com/Cleaning-Augean-Stables-Examining-Strategies/dp/1479297097]

[The Compleat Dramaturg https://books.google.com/books?id=wE9g4Jt8buAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false]